The New Program

Hemingway once said, "I always live a hell of a healthy life for the first three hours of every day." At the time, he wasn't talking about his regular writing habits, but I've always misunderstood to him to mean about five hours, which would include three or four hours of writing and some exercise—then the "unhealthy" part, i.e., good food and lots of drink. These days, in any case, I'm living a hell of a healthy life for the first and last half hour of the working day.

I get up every weekday morning at 6:10AM and putter around making coffee and waking up. At 6:30AM I begin to write these blog posts, which I post at 7:00AM. That's means I've put in 30 minutes of writing. I find I can dependably write between 350 and 700 words, which is to say, about three or four paragraphs worth of words. (Not always quite so well-composed.) One morning I broke 1000 words. Naturally, I always know what I'm going to write about before I go bed at night. In the morning, I get up and just write it.

Most afternoons, I go swimming at the pool by my daughter's figure-skating rink. While she trains, I swim about a kilometer (that's on a really good day, I think I'm usually a bit under) in 30 minutes. Then I sit in the sauna for ten or fifteen minutes and, finally, jump under the cold shower. Thursdays are different because my daughter doesn't skate on Thursdays. So my exercise for that day consists in what will eventually be a 10 km jog (I'm at about 6.5 now) before lunch. I'll still write a 30-minute blog posts in the morning.

Between breakfast and the jog on Thursdays I'll be working on my book of this blog. In a sense, my blogging in the morning is just training/drafting for those three-hour sessions on Thursday, where I'll really be writing. So the program consists of 30 minutes of writing before breakfast and 30 minutes of exercise before dinner, except Thursdays, where I will do three hours of writing and one hour of exercise before lunch.